A Rich Vocation that Might Not Pay Well
How to provoke our imagination toward a bigger calling
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features David Demaree
My foot nervously tapped the brass foot rail as I waited for the man I desperately hoped would be my father-in-law. When he arrived, he barely acknowledged me as he took a seat at the bar, setting the tone for the rest of the evening. After my attempts to break the ice failed, I had no choice but to let the question fly—I asked for his blessing to marry his daughter. Clearly irritated by the request, he let the momentous question hang in the air before breaking the excruciating silence to cross-examine me about my career prospects. I was an adjunct history professor at the time and lacked what he thought was most important. My earning trajectory was, in a word, bleak. At one point I tried to pivot the conversation and broach the subject of our shared Christian faith, to which he replied, “I leave questions about character to the women.” I left the bar that evening without his blessing.
My experience is not unusual, many a beau has been foiled by their beloved’s father. It is no surprise that parents want financial security for their children, but what shocked me then and troubles me now is the primacy of money in our understanding of work and vocation. A default assumption in many corners of American Christianity is that the objective of labor is to maximize our earning potential and establish financial security. I recognize this now as a failed imagination of flourishing.
A sweeping assessment of popular Christian instruction lays bare a malformed understanding of work. On the rare occasion I hear pastors touch on the topic of work it is to praise grinding away with a cheery attitude or encourage an edgy behavior—in a Mike Pence sort of way—at their place of employment, like reading the Bible in front of co-workers. While educated Christians might scoff at the mere mention of prosperity theology, the inference that a plump salary marks God’s blessing can be heard from even the most theologically reformed pulpits. In my own experience, when Christians friends with white-collar jobs mention that someone landed a good job, good in this context means a lucrative salary. Narrowly approaching work to maximize wealth dampens the possible richness of the Christian life.
The general lack of a Christian perspective of occupation and vocation is filled by a financial catechesis grooming us to equate well-being with financial security. Foremost among these teachers is the wealth guru Dave Ramsey. Fourteen million tune into his radio show on a weekly basis to heed his directives. Ramsey, and other experts that air on Christian radio stations, shrink our thinking into a monetary vision for securing our future. Assumptions about work are informed by veneration of money.
One of the most powerful things a financial expert does is provoke their client’s imagination. The first question they often asked is, where do you want to be in five, ten, or twenty years? For too many, the extent of imagining their future flourishing begins and ends with financial planning. This spreadsheet-oriented logic can be summarized as work generates money and money is the key that unlocks the doors to a better life. Not surprisingly then the supremacy of money on our understanding of work and identity is a source of anxiety for many. I am convinced that most feel the logic of working for financial security breakdown at some point. We need something capable of nourishing the rich joy of a full imagination.
Despite this dire perspective, the faultiness of pursuing pure material gain has not gone unaddressed, to be sure. Clear-eyed warnings have emerged from the periphery of mainstream Christianity. Stanley Hauerwas bluntly pronounces, “The lure of wealth and the care of the world produced by wealth quite simply darken and choke out imaginations.” He makes clear that allegiance to the almighty dollar is at enmity with a vibrant church community. But the most chilling broadside comes from Wendell Berry’s pen. His fiery jeremiad, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” gives us a visceral picture of handing our imagination over to market capitalism. “Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made… Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.” Berry’s damning poem drives home a hollowing effect the corporate hegemony of money can have on our life.
So how can we begin thinking about a path forward? For James K. A. Smith, we must start by diagnosing ourselves and our culture. Smith, standing on the shoulders of social theorist Charles Taylor, guides us to see how our tacit assumptions are revealed in the seemingly mundane. Our social imaginaries, according to Taylor, are the submerged, inchoate ways that we imagine the world before we ever think about it. Therefore, it is the stories and practices that form our assumptions about the good life. It is the pressure from peers to achieve an expected level of affluence, or the effects of scrolling through an acquaintance's contrived adventures on social media. These mimetic longings legitimize the assumption that we should giving our work—and even our entire self—to pursue some material version of the good life.
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